GParted is a GTK+ frontend to GNU Parted and the official GNOME Partition Editor application. Use it to make/delete/resize/check partitions of nearly any file format. You can also manage drive labels and flags as well as copy/paste entire partitions. GParted is available in the extra repo and also as a Live CD if you'd prefer. One reason to actually download the Live CD would be that you need to make modifications to your root filesystem's partition which you cannot do without unmounting it.

Warning: Since GParted can read/write to your drive partitions misuse can result in data loss. It is recommended that you back-up affected partitions prior to using GParted.

GParted support

Tips and tricks

Adding GParted-live to your GRUB menu

See the Gparted-Live wiki article for instructions on adding GParted-live to your GRUB menu so you can boot into the same live environment as the GParted-live CD directly from GRUB and without the CD!

Dual booting with Windows XP

If you have a Windows XP partition that you would like to move from drive-to-drive that also happens to be your boot partition, you can do so easily with GParted and keep Windows happy simply by deleting the following registry key PRIOR to the partition move:

So 1-3 are primary partitions. 5-6 are logical partitions within the extended partition. Let's say you want to nuke /dev/sda5 and copy/paste /dev/sda2 into the resulting freespace. Now your drive looks like this: /dev/sda1 (Primary partition)

Notice that the order is messed up after your delete, copy/paste operation. This can cause all sorts of problems from not being able to mount an expected partition, to GRUB error 17/no bootable system. The solution to this little problem is simple:

Boot with your Arch Live CD or GParted Live CD (or any other live Linux CD)

Run fdisk on the drive, enter expert mode, fix the partition order, and write the changes to disk

Example using /dev/sda:

# fdisk /dev/sda

Once you are in fdisk, choose option x (extra functionality (experts only)) and enter

Then select f (fix partition order) and enter

Then select option w (write table to disk and exit), and enter

Note: You must run partprobe as root or reboot the system in order for the kernel to read the new partition table!

Starting GParted from a menu

If you are having issues loading GParted from a menu, for instance the xfce applications menu, you will have to install the polkit package and autostart it with your session.